I had a blast making the game for LD48 but wow, was i tired last night.

Anyway here is the game as submitted: http://www.strangechair.se/LD21/

and here is the  Time-lapse.

Now to try out hundreds of new games!

I’m currently attempting to submit my entry for LD21 and thought I’d share some of the steps along the way with screenshots (from timelapse archive, <3 chronolapse).

No better way to start than a title screen:

I then got stuck straight into the concept I had for “escape” – solving puzzles to move up levels of a tower/dungeon to escape rising lava levels, with a snakes and ladders like “fall down 3 levels” mechanic if you got something wrong. First up, an indicator on the screen for your level and the level of the lava!

It wasn’t long before I scrapped that idea as I couldn’t think of how to implement a nice variety of puzzles that could increase in difficulty while being randomly generated (admittedly, I didn’t give the problem a lot of thought) and started work on my second idea, a side scrolling platformer where you outrun an advancing lava wave! I jumped into photoshop and threw together some concept art for the platforms you could run and jump along.

It became quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be much room for variety in level generation, and with tile designs like that it looked entirely possible to fall down a gap between tiles just by offsetting vertically. I could have worked on a more solid tile design, but instead I decided to forego graphics for the time being and get to work on random terrain generation, rendered as solid white for now, with a little red rectangle for the player! The “minimap” appeared and stuck with the game mostly unchanged all the way through.

Some time spent looking at a friend’s progress:

And back to my own work. Making quick progress now, I added a lava wall behind you and blue obstacle blocks floating in the air. At this stage I was intending to have the blue blocks as indestructable objects which were a lot less common than they are now and intended to have a seperate type of creature you would have to shoot and kill as you progressed across the world.

Next on the agenda was meteors raining from the sky! Rendered as simple circles themselves they were very uninteresting to have falling across the screen, so I added smoke particles trailing behind them. These were supposed to grow in size and lose opacity so they’d become invisible and be destroyed when they were completely unseen. It didn’t work as intended at first and there was amusement when they added to my lava wall and started covering the screen with “smoke”. It made the game much harder to play, and because they never despawned the game went slower and slower! Glad I got screenshots to remember it.

Smoke particles fixed and tested against different coloured backgrounds, the game was coming together nicely now – it needed an end condition though. I quickly made an image for failure and added it to the game. Also added a distance text at this point, so you could see how far you were getting!

Time for some more fancy graphics – cue the Lava Tsunami of Doom, for which the game will be applauded and named. Also added 2 background layers which scroll at different speeds.

The game was still lacking something while playing though, so I figured I should add some sounds. Audiotool.com for background “music” and bfxr.net for sound effects. Pow!

And then with everything else done, graphics for the rest of the game!

And that’s that!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5019

Watch the Timelapse video of my LD #21 entry Stromcrow:

I did manage to submit my entry before the competition ended, but as the website was going so absurdly slow at the time, I didn’t write anything about it. Perhaps next time I will attempt post more updates during the competition.

My entry was made in Actionscript3 with the Flashpunk library.
Software used: vim, gimp, lmms, audacity, sfxr.
Timelapse video created with my timelapse script and Kdenlive.

Tags: timelapse

Hey everybody. I’ve written up a post-mortem on my game, with thoughts about what the game means, why I made the decisions I did as far as the two-player requirement and some other gameplay mechanics, and the backstory on how the game itself came to be. Check it out at my website.

And, a quick side-note: huge congratulations to everyone who completed and submitted a game this time around! You’re all awesome. I look forward playing as many of the games as I can this week.

The Grind was my first entry for Ludum Dare. This is an in-depth breakdown of the development went.

My goal was simply to finish something and I’m happy to say I achieved that goal. I ended up having to cut the vast majority of gameplay features, graphics, and sound (entirely), but the contest was a good exercise in scoping down a project to fit into the time available.

Time breakdown:

• Planning: 1 hour
• Map design/editor: 3 hours
• General coding: 6 hours
• Graphics: 3 hours (including scrapped art)
• Testing and bug fixing: 3 hours
• Real life + sleep: 32 hours

Lessons learned:

A narrow scope leaves time for polishing. I came into the contest with a vague notion of how time-constrained I’d be, but I didn’t truly appreciate the level of urgency until about 3/4 of the way through the contest. At the beginning, I tried to scope my project down to make it achievable, but honestly I brainstormed ideas I had no chance of implementing in time. This led to wasted time working on features that were later cut (e.g. smart phone text, nicer looking wall graphics).

Don’t underestimate time spent on algorithms. I had a rough idea of how to implement simple collision detection/resolution and line of sight detection, but I really underestimated how much time it would take to implement something acceptable. My first few attempts at collision resolution could lead to the player getting “stuck” and it was so frustrating that I had to keep iterating until I found something that “just worked.” On the plus side, I managed to come up with a simple line-of-sight algorithm late at night that works very well (set “debug = true” in the main script file to watch it in action).

Real life matters, but can be inconvenient. I hadn’t planned on spending roughly 11 of my waking hours doing “real life” things, but I think I had a better weekend and enjoyed the contest more because of it. After I submitted my entry, I was glad that I had done something else fun before it was time to go back to work on Monday.

Critique of The Grind:

The Grind is a very shallow game, but it is entertaining to watch the player get hounded by many bosses at once. I enjoyed watching 3 different guys in suits all say “Have some work!” right as I turned a corner.

Obviously, the game could use more polish. There are no menus to speak of and the smart phone isn’t really used very effectively (the original plan was to have various tasks show up on the phone–in the end, it’s just your score). The graphics ended up being a strange mix of 2D overhead (for the walls) and 3/4 (for the characters); this was simply a function of running out of time to make the wall graphics look good from a 3/4 angle. Lastly, the lack of sound and music is regrettable, but these were last on my list of priorities by necessity.

In the end, though, I had a blast and can’t wait to play through the other entries. Thanks to the Ludum Dare community for arranging this event!

Tags: postmortem

Just wanted to write a few notes about my submitted entry “Abandoned”, which participated in LD21 (escape).

You can try the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2393

First of all, it feels really good to have been able to submit the entry within the deadline. I have to say I’m really pleased with the result.
I had a great time coming up with all the weird artwork (which IMHO looks really good considering that I’m not a particularly good designer/illustrator). I really wanted the game to be creepy… which it is

About the controls I think the basic movement is really good, however the attack is a bit tricky (a tip is to collect a lot of green chrystals to speed up the rotation of the eyeball and just use it as a shield). That specific attack is based on an attack from a game for the C64 (I don’t know the name, and haven’t seen it since about 1989, so its probably just a twisted memory).

I really wanted the game to be more of a bullet hell game, but I designed the level in the last 3 hours and was really tired. Just one more hour would have improved the game a huge lot. Tweaking the position of the enemies and the rate which they spawn their particles.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, and now I have a lot of games to browse.
My thanks to the LD-crew (who struggled with the servers) and all developers who kept inspiring through status updates on the blog and in the irc. I’ll see you again!
/Tommy Salomonsson

(journal – entry)

Here’s the timelapse!

Tags: timelapse

Waking up at 1:30 PM in the day today with aching fingers, I felt happy.

The game is actually pretty fun to play, and not too badly balanced. There are three zones of different colors, and each zone get’s a bit harder. The enemies get a little too fast and jumpy after a while though.

I don’t regret using Flashpunk this time, it really makes everything so much easier than using just as3 like last time. I spent many hours on a stupid bug though, and realised Flashpunk tilemaps do not actually clear tiles when you call clearTile() on them if the clear tile (index 0) is transparent. That was annoying and made me loose a lot of time.

I think the leaderboard can add a lot to the game. Sadly Playtomic has disabled it’s leaderboards due to some problems, but it should be working soon again.

I didn’t really make any graphics at all, but focused on gameplay instead. I think that was a good idea, but the game could really use some better graphics. The music and sound effects could be better too, but they do the job.

A breakdown of the time spent in different applications (tracked with ProcrastiTracker):

• Flashdevelop 13h
• Chrome 6h
• Flashplayer 4h
• XChat 2h
• Photoshop 2h
• Cubase 1h

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2311

I didn’t make the deadline, but I’m still working on the game I started. Here’s a quick screenshot.
I’ll try to finish it before the Jam deadline, but I doubt it 😐

While youtube continues to refuse my ogg video timelapse all I can say it was done in time, 7 seconds prior to the 48hour deadline and about 15 seconds before I fell asleep for the next 14 hours…

Some bugs remain but its playable, and the name is the result of me beign too tired to remember the awesome one I had worked out earlier and the typo ‘p’ the result of caffeine at 2:50AM.

If you run windows, audio will omst likely not work, if you use linux x86_64 it may work but I recommend compiling….

Check it out here if you are brave enough: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4203

Developped with the nonstop briti-nyan, nyan-cat and other nyan variants to ensure maximum code nyan-a-bility.

Here’s the link to my final LD entry: SurfN-2-Sur5

Vote link

Some helpful tips to get started:

• When starting out you’re falling from the sky, wait until you hit the water to turn.
• In order to have a successful landing you need to be facing in the direction you’re moving.
• Write down your longest time/distance and try to beat it (if you’re into that).

Controls:
Arrow keys Move
Space or Enter restarts

I made the game in PixieEngine, the tools are getting better and these games keep getting easier and easier to make.

I finished the background music earlier using Aviary this afternoon and I think it’s pretty rad. Aviary was tough to get the hang of and was rough with importing loops into the larger song arranger, but once I got the basics down it was just a matter of toughing it out.

Here’s the link to the audio:
https://rookery.s3.amazonaws.com:443/9491000/9491020_96a4.mp3

I was pretty proud of drawing the little pixel surfer guy. Originally I wanted him to have twice as many rotations as well as subtle animations, but you know combinatorics…

Timelapse

This is the timelapse of my attempt at Ludum dare. If you watch closely, you can see that i make 3 games. Two extra because of technical problems

<Salzkorn> how's your game goin
 <Salzkorn> finished in time?
 <asiekierka> almost
 <asiekierka> but crash bugs were fixable post-mortem
 <asiekierka> i fixed all but one until i said "fuck it"
 <Salzkorn> call it feature
 <asiekierka> the game stops sending data to you every 5 minutes (in multiplayer)
 <asiekierka> because you're a piece of shit so everyone tries to escape from YOU and not the infinite map they're supposed to escape from
 <asiekierka> THERE WE GO!

Dear judges, keep that in mind while playing my game. Thanks.

*Phew* Ludum Dare is so damn crazy. I think this Ludum Dare I didn’t make enough progress on the first day. The game turned out pretty nicely, although it’s probably not as original as I wanted it to be. One of the core mechanics I had planned for my game was having the wolves be able to chase the player around, so you could lure the out of the way instead of fighting them, while running the risk of getting trapped. It also could have used more original obstacles, with more gameplay depth than “go to A to get the key then go to B to open the door”. Kind of like the fighting. It also needed more levels. In fact, when I first submitted it, before knowing that there had been a 12-hour extension to the dead-line, the game only had a test room. Afterwards I realized that I still had time, so I was able to make a real level, test it properly, and even add sounds! It’s only a few, though. And there’s still no music. Another issue is that I didn’t make any decorative props, like I planned originally. This might sound superfluous, but scenery is actually very important in any game with big areas (mazes and exploration games), especially when you’re using walls that all look the same.

Escape from the Wolf Castle

Studies show than posts with chinchillas have a 20% bigger chance to attract attention from the common page-scroller

On the bright side, I think the game turned out fun. I made a checkpoint movement mechanic that I had never done before, I was able to make some nice animations for my rabbit, and I even made a turn-based combat system that players are able to learn on their first try, all under 48 hours! And I even crunched some home-made sound effects in there, too! It was the first time I made sound effects, and I have to say it was surprisingly easy. I have next to no experience with sound effects, but with a microphone and some free software, I was able to much together something. I realize now that it’s a HUGE difference in quality, from having no sound effects to having some basic crappy ones. It’s also very quick and easy to make.

I hope you all enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed playing it! Eventually I’ll want to develop this some more to make it more complete, but for now I’ll listen to my victory song (Frog’s Theme from Chrono Trigger. It’s a very encouraging song) and relax after my exhausting 60 hours of making a game. Thanks for reading!

So I finished my game last night! I really struggled with the theme at first – one of those that can be used for a game in so many ways it was hard to pin something original and interesting down. While I’m not convinced I truly achieved that in my concept, this has been by far my best execution on a Ludum Dare to date. I actually had a little time to polish! But no DISCO

Click to go to the game page

So, pretty happy. I also took a timelapse with Chronolapse that I stuck up on YouTube if anyone’s interested:

Timelapse

Tags: Flixel, timelapse

I just finished up my jam entry, Frickin’ Laser Beams, you can check it out here:

http://www.uncade.com/prototypes/frickin-laser-beams/

Overall I’m really happy with how this turned out. It’s a platformer where you have to run to the energy shields to avoid being killed by the ever present danger of laser beams. I might decide to keep working on this as a full game, not sure yet. I added music for the first time to my entry, totally worth it It also ended up looking a lot like minesweeper, which was unintended, but kinda cool now that I look at it.

Tried to make my first game ever with a selfmade engine and in 48h: Escape Velocity is what came out of it.

What went right:
– Base code: Already having drawing code and good collision detection in my engine saved me so much work. I don’t think I’d have anything
– Javascript: Man, I love this language.
– Real life: I managed to find time to BBQ with the family and go to the pub on LD weekend.. Food, Beer and Coding? Awesome.

What went wrong/Lessons learned:
– Physics: I really like physic based games.. but I really suck at coding them.
– Base code: I also tried to integrate the physics in the engine and that was a rather bad idea. I could have saved so much time if I’d just took the straightforward way.. next time: more work on the game, less work on the engine.
– Timelapse: next time I’ll make sure my script does not capture in 100% quality and I have enough disk space. Missing an hour or two in the video.
– Time for polish: There are a few tweaks I wanted to do but did not have the time to (especially how the gravity bullet behaves). Also more levels with greater diversity would have been nice.

Although my game is not that good, I really enjoyed making it and I think I’ll participate again next year (:
Now off to play all these awesome games!

Now that I’ve had an evening to gather my thoughts, I wanted to write a bit about the game I built for LD21. I submitted my entry into the Jam so that me and a friend could work together on it. That said, we limited ourselves to 48 hours and followed by the rules of the competition the best we could.

Overall the project went smoothly from start to finish and didn’t encounter any major issues, so I’ll go over some of the things I think went well for our project.

When we first got word of the competition’s theme, we just sat there quietly for about 10 minutes. I pitched the idea “You’re an escaped prisoner or something, piloting a ship down a corridor, where you have to break down these gates and dodge bullets while being chased by a big bad guy. Maybe with giant saw blades or something.” The game was more of a ‘chase’ game than an ‘escape’ game, but escape is a pretty broad term, and we figured we could hit the theme if we provided a little background to the characters prior to going into the gameplay portion of the game.

We used Unity for development. I must admit, while unity is awesome, the best part of it is the rapid prototyping. We took our idea and made a playable game within 3-4 hours of the start of the competition. We identified a lot about what would, and what wouldn’t work about our idea. You can see the prototype HERE.

We ditched the idea of gates, since we liked the idea of constantly accelerating gameplay. Gates required you to be able to shoot, something we got rid of, and also required to slow down, which we felt would probably break the flow of the game. The obstacles in the test version were entertaining enough, so we kept them around. We thought the game was way more interesting when the enemy was on screen rather than off, so we made it so that the enemy couldn’t fall too far behind.

The way I set up the game’s movement (as in the speed the stage scrolls) is kind of interesting. The speed the game was moving at was handled as two values; the target speed (the speed the player should move at) and real speed (the speed the player is really moving at). Getting hit dropped your real speed by a % (in the final version you slow by 10% for bullets, 15% for obstacles), and you recover speed by a set amount per second. That actually let us increase the difficulty by simply adjusting the speed the player moves at, since getting hit while moving faster would penalize you more. The enemy, his speed remains at 98% of your target speed, until he hits the bottom of the screen at which he matches it 100%.

Some really interesting things happened with this set up though that we didn’t originally intend. Getting hit just once didn’t really set you back very much because you recovered the speed you lose almost immediately. Consecutive hits would slow you down more, and more importantly, for much longer, which penalizes you much more. This meant that we didn’t have to make a game where your goal wasn’t to get hit… we could make the goal to try to avoid getting hit multiple times in a short period of time.

I was a little disappointed that actually slowing down was not noticeable. In the final version, even hitting multiple objects in a row, you won’t actually notice a change in speed, even though the scroll speed slowing down is what lets the enemy catch up to you. I think the shaking that occurs when you get hit hides the slowdown, but we needed the shaking to make it obvious that you got hit, since the explosion audio queue also sounds when an obstacle is destroyed by the enemy.

The enemy creeping up on the screen had gameplay implications that we hadn’t really foreseen, but once we saw it we kind of ran with it. I didn’t really notice much until a player mentioned on twitter that he enjoyed the way that the enemy’s position acted as a health bar of sorts. That made my day, and allowed us to make it a bigger part of the game. As you make mistakes, you’re given less room to work with, which makes further mistakes more likely. It reminds me of messing up in a game of Tetris, as the blocks pile up, you now have less time to plan your moves. It’s kind of invigorating, and while it wasn’t originally in intended feature, it was just one of those things that we were like “heey, that’s pretty interesting, lets see if we can make this a more important part of the game.”

It’s kind of amazing just how much a game, even one as small as a weekend competition game like this one can change over the course of development. We kind of had an idea where we wanted to be right from the start, as the prototype we built at the start looks fairly similar to the final product, but the actual gameplay was refined a considerable amount to make an interesting experience.

So yeah, I guess the take-away was that because we had our plan and working game so early, almost the entire 48 hour process was polishing and tweaking to make it more fun.  That’s a really good way to do it I think, it would have been much more stressful if we hadn’t had something running early on.

I want to thank Mike Paulson for helping me out with graphics, his art added a lot to the the game and it would have been a much uglier game if I had to do it all!

I hope you enjoy the game, let me know what you think!  Web/Windows/Mac version are available, as well as a timelapse and source code.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5375

Here’s the full final version of the timelapse video, along with some gameplay video at the end.

My submission included the Windows version, I’m working on the Mac version now.

Forgot about that and am too lazy to edit.

What went right:
Music
Gameplay
Graphics
Submission Time
Food
IRC
Almost everything else.

What went wrong

The site server ^_.^ (I’m thankful to PoV and Phil for fixing it, though)
The variable ‘jump = 1’ x_.x

So, there, done.